Sony survey hints at PS4 compatibility with PS2 games

Sony has teased some of its PlayStation 4 owners with a suggestion that backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games could be coming in a future update, letting it begin to rival Microsoft's upcoming support for playing Xbox 360 games on Xbox One.

In a recently-issued survey, Sony asked its players to pick the features they would most like to see in the next major PS4 software update. Polygon reports that images posted to NeoGAF show most of the options are fairly minor additions such as "Filtering options in game libraries," "Custom backgrounds" and "Appear offline mode" but there are also some more interesting listings including "PS1 classics" and "PS2 classics."

Backwards compatibility is an oft-requested feature by gamers on any popular platform. People who have devoted hours to titles in the past end up leaving their dedication behind as they upgrade to a newer console incapable of playing the games once viewed as cutting-edge in the context of its predecessor.

The popularity of being able to play older games on current-generation consoles was highlighted by Sony rival Microsoft during E3 this year. The company announced that a growing library of Xbox 360 games will be playable on Xbox One with full support for all features. Players will get their first experience of Xbox 360 backwards compatibility next month with the launch of the new Windows 10-powered Xbox One Experience.

Such a large update from Microsoft has left Sony fans wondering how the Japanese entertainment giant will react. The company has said it would be very hard to get PlayStation 3 titles running on PS4 due to the complexity of the older console, but now appears to be hinting it may be able to inject some new life into the games built for the PS2 and PS1, giving long-time fans a nostalgic feel in the process.

SlashGear notes another question in the survey asked players to say when they expect the next major update to be released with options ranging from "before the end of 2015" to "2017 or later." The next release will be known as System Software 4.0 and will be a free update from version 3.0, released last month.

With all things considered, it looks very much like this survey and the strange questions it involves are intended to drum up a bit of press for Sony ahead of Microsoft's big Xbox update early this month. By asking fans "When would you expect PlayStation to release the next big System Software update?" Sony can demonstrate that it is working on something "big," potentially with features to rival Microsoft's popular Xbox One backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games.